


Enough

by DarkIsRising



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Infinite sadness, Whump, at least one drabble, au now i guess, fic+drabbles?, maybe more later - Freeform, traveling with a baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29846355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkIsRising/pseuds/DarkIsRising
Summary: Set during RotSWhen it’s all over, it comes down to the two of them: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker.1. Enough2. In the end3. Words
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Luke Skywalker
Comments: 21
Kudos: 63





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tessiete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessiete/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enough

When it’s all over, it comes down to the two of them: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. 

Obi-Wan Kenobi and a _baby_ and his rotations helping the creche master as a padawan hadn’t ever prepared him for this. He’s been at war for so long, has tasted more death in the past night alone, it feels, than in all his years as a general, that he's forgotten what the refrain of birth sounds like as it strums through the Force. The impossibility that after bearing witness to so much destruction he is now holding a young, brittle life—that he is charged with keeping this young, brittle life _alive_ —is only now starting to sink it.

Luke is tiny, really just the barest of bones and muscles and a length of skin, and even that skin is saggy. So small, like he couldn’t possibly fill out the excess, and it humbles Obi-Wan, to have this slight being in his arms as he punches in coordinates for his first jump into hyperspace with his free hand.

“Keep him warm. Keep him close,” Bail had said when Obi-Wan admitted that he had no idea what he was doing. “He’s going to cry, that’s to be expected.”

Even expected it’s a shock when the wailing begins.

***

Hyperspace is never pleasant for a Jedi. The gaping emptiness in the Force is a special kind of loneliness, one that gets more manageable over time but never really goes away.

Obi-Wan’s first trip through it he’d been four years old, headed toward a Temple he’d never heard of and a future he could only catch a glimmer of in the dull refraction of the Seeker’s lightsaber hilt. The Jedi had been kind, had held his hand through the worst of his desolate sobs, had promised that he’d get used to it, that the Order sent Jedi throughout the galaxy to help beings that needed it most and one day Obi-Wan would be out there helping along with them.

Now there is no Order. No Jedi, save him and Master Yoda.

Now the being that needs help the most is this tiny child with a crumpled face—too young for proper tears—turning red the longer this ‘jump goes on. 

“Don’t worry, Luke. After we get to Tatooine you’ll never have to experience hyperspace again,” Obi-Wan murmurs as he gently bounces the baby the way he’d seen Bail do. 

He can only hope that he’s right, because hyperspace means leaving Tatooine, and leaving Tatooine means something has gone horribly wrong with the plan. It would mean Anakin has somehow found him. Has somehow found them, as Obi-Wan isn’t planning on leaving, either, if he can prevent it.

The bouncing isn’t working the way it had for Bail, so Obi-Wan tries other things. A new diaper. A new taste of artificial milk. All of these attempts Luke greets with the same inconsolable cry, heartbreaking for how soft it is despite Luke’s best efforts, as if his lungs aren’t capable of expelling out the sheer breadth of his anguish.

“I know, dear one. I know,” Obi-Wan says, because his own lungs are also not capable of screams loud enough to do his anguish justice, either.

Until they are, Luke will have to do the crying for the both of them.

***

There is a pattern to Obi-Wan’s jumps through hyperspace in so much as there is no pattern at all. He has to do this right if he’s to keep this burgeoning Empire’s forces at bay. To keep Luke safe, to keep this last flicker of Padmé Amidala’s light shining in a galaxy that has gone so very dark and cold and empty.

He has to be mindful of his own predictability because Anakin knows Obi-Wan’s ways. He might know them better than Obi-Wan. He has studied Obi-Wan since he was a boy with only the stubbiest of nerf tails and a braid that barely passed his ear lobe. While Obi-Wan was only just beginning to feel out his place in the Order without Qui-Gon’s steady guidance to turn to, Anakin had been watching him, taking him in with big blue eyes and a slave’s instinct for keeping one step ahead of his master’s moods.

Luke will never be a slave. He will never be a Jedi, but he does have his father’s eyes. 

By the strength of his ‘saber and to the last breath of his life, Obi-Wan will guard Luke. He will see to it that those blue eyes are the only part of Anakin’s legacy that lives on.

***

There is a bassinet in the ship that he can use, of course, but the wailing gets more frenzied any time Obi-Wan tries to set Luke in it.

So he doesn’t.

With a wriggle that reminds Obi-Wan of larva, Luke travels the planes of Obi-Wan’s chest. It is a graceless movement, to be sure, but he is determined about it. Up, up, up Luke makes his way until the downy softness of the crown of his head meets the scruff of Obi-Wan’s beard.

Still it is not enough to satisfy the industrious youngling.

Obi-Wan catches him, brings him back down, only for Luke to start his journeying once more. 

Luke is searching for something with singular intent and, of the two of them, only Obi-Wan knows he will never find it.

***

It is no secret that Obi-Wan wrestles with fears, as any in the Order might, and his biggest one is this: Obi-Wan fears that he will never be enough. 

Qui-Gon had battled that demon alongside him, to little effect. There had been thirteen years spent seated by Qui-Gon in meditation as they synchronized their breaths, their thoughts, their hearts. Thirteen years of surfacing only to see the bright blue of Qui-Gon’s eyes and a troubled frown etched across his brow. Thirteen years of hearing a chiding “ _Obi-Wan,_ ” as if that’s all it would take to exorcise this insecurity that is burrowed deep and rooted fast. He could be cured if only he hears one more chiding “ _Obi-Wan._ ”

But in the end Obi-Wan had been right all along.

He hadn’t been enough to stop a Sith from killing Qui-Gon. He hadn’t been enough to bring this protracted war to an end. He hadn’t been enough to save Padmé or pull Anakin back from the brink or preserve the Order or any number of other failures that pile like limp bodies across the landscape of his mind’s eye.

Obi-Wan isn’t enough to bring Luke peace, but he can hold him through the hours that trickle by. 

Time is rendered meaningless by the unalloyed volume of it, and still Obi-Wan holds the boy. 

His head drops down sharply and he jerks back to wakefulness. Sleep isn’t something he can responsibly seek out, not with a baby in his arms, so he fights against it. He fights to keep his bleary eyes open. He fights the heavy press of fatigue in his arms and holds his charge tight.

Obi-Wan dully watches the whiteout of stars streaming past and wonders why, of all the Jedi that were stronger, wiser, more powerful than he, it has all come down to one that is so very ineffectual.

***

With a jolt they leave hyperspace and the deep black of space greets them.

It is vast. It is bleak. In it, Obi-Wan can see that he is so very insignificant.

Luke has finally stopped crying. He is pressed to Obi-Wan’s chest, matching bare skin to bare skin, shallow breath to shallow breath, beating heart to beating heart.

Reaching out with a hand that trembles slightly—the sum total of all he’s experienced bearing down on this one moment—Obi-Wan sets the ship’s coordinates for Tatooine.

Artwork by the amazing [ kyber-erso ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aoraki/pseuds/kyber-erso)

(Have you ever seen a more gorgeous piece of art before??? I can't deal with this level of perfection, honestly)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the end

In the end, he can’t bring himself to do it.

Obi-Wan is standing outside a hanger in Mos Eisley, a baby pressed to his chest, when his legs stop working. He needs to keep moving forward. The crowd is jostling him now, pushing and grumbling at the human that has suddenly gone still. 

"Out of the way, two legs," a Steriana mutters in her native tongue, slithering past.

Luke’s very life depends on Obi-Wan’s discretion, on the two of them going unnoticed, and Obi-Wan is failing him. He can feel it in the hot burn of staring eyes. In the claustrophobic press of regard as thoughts hone in to the pair of them like a tractor beam—taking in the crying baby, the blaster burns in Obi-Wan’s cloak from where Cody had missed.

There’s a stink in the air here: of refuse and sickness and vice. Still, it isn’t as strong as the rotting bite of sulfur that clings to Obi-Wan’s hair from Mustafar’s lava fields.

His eyes ache, as if they mourn the passing of tears that have come and gone, and he blinks down at the youngling in his arms. Luke is sleeping, wrinkled face gone slack. This town is so loud he can no longer hear the quiet huffs of breath that he knows Luke is making.

It’s one loss too many.

He can bear the people that he’s lost: his battalion, his commander, Padme, Mace. The Temple’s younglings, and the masters and their padawans, and the initiates that will never have the chance to join their ranks. 

He can bear the loss of his home: the meditation gardens’ serenity and the archives’ wisdom; the salle, that always smelled like sweat; and the refectory, that always sounded like companionship; and the healer’s hall, that always felt like ease.

But this—the sound of Luke breathing in sleep—this loss is unbearable.

He is moving now, and he’s maybe attracting attention for the speed of it but he’s too far gone to care. He needs to get somewhere quiet enough to hear Luke again.

Obi-Wan knows that soon enough he will pass the child onto his aunt and uncle, and then Obi-Wan will never hear the sound of his lungs whuffing in sleep again. He will never see his face crumple in hunger, or feel the downy crown of his head pressed into the hollow of Obi-Wan’s throat.

Stepping away from the clattering crowd he finds silence in the merciless desert. Sand rises and falls in gentle orange mounds, brushing against the blue expanse of sky and Obi-Wan can see in it the despondency of eternity. 

His own despondency. 

His own eternity.

And in that moment, with the huff of Luke’s breath drifting into his ear, he decides it.

He will raise the boy.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Words

He wonders—when he has the time to wonder through all the worry—what the boy will call him.

Obi-Wan has no experience with family in the usual sense as he’s learned it. His lineage has always been one he could trace through the Order’s vast archives. Though Jedi aren’t meant to possess, it could certainly be said that he’s inherited his Master’s calm, his Grand-Master’s refinement. Someday he hopes to inherit Master Yoda’s ability to weather the battering, blistering passages of time that always seem to leave Obi-Wan cut adrift and reeling.

But as to people, as to relationships and that sort of thing, Obi-Wan’s comrades whether they be Jedi or clone have always served in place of the words that every language the galaxy over has a name for.

Father. Mother. Brother. Sister. Uncle. Aunt.

Pick any one of them, teach Luke to use it when he’s old enough to speak, and they two might just manage to stay hidden. Perhaps Obi-Wan is Luke’s father, alone to raise a son without the loving support of a spouse. Perhaps he’s an uncle or even, if he’d been precocious enough about those sorts of carnal matters, his grandfather.

Obi-Wan certainly feels old enough to be a grandfather these days in the dry heat of the desert. Out here—while the wind whistles past the barren dunes, where there is only domestic matters rather than galactic crises to distract him from it all—he has started to feel the ache of his years in battle settle into joints that crack now when he stands. He can feel the handful of days leading up to the Order’s end in the strained muscles that healed poorly after a final plunge on Utapau. He can feel the fires of Mustafar in the tight, silver scars that cut through clusters of sun-coaxed freckles across his skin. Age has come for Obi-Wan Kenobi at long last, and he regrets that he doesn’t wear it nearly as gracefully as Qui-Gon did once, a lifetime ago.

Time, for Luke, is a different matter entirely. Obi-Wan surfaces one day from a pummeling cycle of feeding and soothing and changing and bathing to the realization that Luke is watching him. Obi-Wan hasn’t had much use for smiles in their exile, but he feels the flicker of social habit coaxed at the sight of Luke’s regard, and so he smiles. Small. Reflexive. Polite.

Luke takes in that smile with a blink, and that would be that, except one day Obi-Wan looks down to the youngling in his arms to see a smile on his face—once given and now returned.

It is a brief smile, gone before Obi-Wan has a chance to so much as notice it.

“Thank you, dear one,” he says, pressing a finger to the soft pad of Luke’s cheek, and it isn’t until Luke is smiling again that he realizes that it is only because Obi-Wan did it first.

Time. As Obi-Wan has swirled through its eddies these last few months, Luke, it seems, has found better purchase. He is able to raise his chest and then he’s able to press into his arms, and one day he is rolling onto his back—a horrible surprise that leaves him howling in anger as Obi-Wan helplessly laughs, holding him through the worst of his wails.

“I didn’t know you could do that, either,” Obi-Wan says to the red face and presses a kiss to the crown of Luke’s head where his hair has begun to come in thicker, the same blond as the sands outside their door. 

First comes movement, then comes sound, and some day after that, Obi-Wan knows, will be language. He will need to know long before then what Luke should call him, but he has time still to decide. That is the blessing of Luke’s age: he is young enough for Obi-Wan to learn and make mistakes and learn some more with his small charge being none the wiser. 

Still, it would do Obi-Wan better to be prepared.

In the end, the decision is taken away from Obi-Wan entirely. 

They are at the market, Obi-Wan sorting through muja fruits and root vegetables when the vendor appears by his elbow.

“And who do we have here?” she says, eyes sparkling as she takes in the baby that is wrapped tight and suspended in the center of Obi-Wan’s chest. It used to make Obi-Wan wary, when beings would step so close to him to get a better look at Luke, but he’s gotten used to it now.

Babies have their own gravitational pull, as he’s learned, and after testing the air around her to find nothing through the Force but her delight at the sight of a child, he stands still for her to get her better look.

He’s learned it’s easier this way.

“This is Luke,” Obi-Wan says, and she warbles a high “Hello Luke” back to the solemn baby.

“Oh!” she says in excitement. Obi-Wan looks down to see she is being greeted by a smile as bright as the suns glinting off the stall’s durasteel shell. “Oh, look at you! What a smile!”

She laughs as she takes the fruits and vegetables that Obi-Wan has chosen and carefully fills a burlap bag with them.

“You’re going to be a handful for your papa with a smile like that. I can already tell.”

Papa. It’s a word, Obi-Wan can admit, that has never once occurred to him. But he has been so many other words in his life—initiate, padawan, knight, master—that he knows the guiding hand of the Force when he feels it, and so ‘papa’ he shall be.


End file.
